If you cannot trust your local network for some reason, SSH tunneling can help you. All you need is:
My remote machine runs Debian, and I decided to install
tinyproxy, a tiny HTTP proxy server. Configuration
is done quickly by adding the following lines to
/etc/tinyproxy/tinyproxy.conf:
Port 8888 Listen 127.0.0.1
I would recommend commenting out any other Listen
lines. Assuming you do not want to run an open proxy, you only
want tinyproxy to listen locally. After editing the
configuration file, restart the proxy via
/etc/init.d/tinyproxy restart.
On your local machine, execute the following command:
ssh user@server.example.net -L 1234:localhost:8888 -N
This forwards all traffic from your local port 1234 to the
remote machine's port 8888 (localhost is needed
because we configured the server to listen only to the loopback
interface), which is where tinyproxy waits for
inputs.
You may now tell your cool
browser to use localhost:1234 as a proxy
server—congratulations, your web traffic is now securely
tunnelled to your remote machine.
Addendum: In the command string from above, you can also use
-f to request ssh to go into the background.